Not too late?

I said that to her this morning. She thought it was going to lead to something she didn’t want to talk about, but I just said, “You know how you said you’re sorry you couldn’t be the mother I needed you to be? Well, it’s not too late to change that. There’s still time. And it would make a *huge* difference in my life if you did.”

Well, guess what? Today, she put some money in my checking account.

After that early morning phone call, I called her again later, out of desperation, knowing it was going to get really, really cold tonight. I’m low on food, low on money, car’s got something going wrong with it and there’s no *way* I’m taking it out in this weather only to add a stranded car and a tow fee to my already overwhelming list.

I said, ”If anybody’s coming by this way, I could use some extra blankets.”

She said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

Pushing a little harder in my frustration at her seeming lack of concern, I said, “Otherwise, your daughter might end up like one of those little birds you find on the sidewalk in the morning, with its little toes curled up.”

“Frozen,” she said.

“Dead,” said I. I started crying, the abandonment fear grabbing my gut again.

She said, “I’ll put some money in your checking account so you can pay for heat, and then when the snow clears up a bit, we’ll get you some blankets.”

She finally, *finally*, asked me some actual *questions*, and seemed to understand where I was at. I told her about the unpaid bills, the badly insulated house, what I’d done to try to make things better. About the sheets of plexiglas I’d bought last winter as makeshift ‘storm windows’ to try to avoid going through all that again.

My resources for getting things done have been so slim – I got a friend to take me and the plexiglas to a hardware store to be cut to size (I got them at an architectural salvage yard for cheap, but they had to be cut down to fit). But when I got to the point of trying to install them, I realized I’d forgotten to allow for the blinds – so the plexi sheets were almost an inch too big in one direction, and, being ¼” thick, there was no give anywhere.

I told her all these things, and she already knows about the car, and I said, “I’m ...just, just...” she said, “Overwhelmed.”

The relief is almost unbearable. I have to keep *moving*, *act* on having this money, before something *else* happens. Even though what I *really* feel like is just going to sleep. Must be what a person with hypothermia gets like – they just can’t really think straight any more.